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Artifact 2 - a conversation about past activities and hobbies..hobbies.mp3
Artifact 3 - a conversation about future plans.future.amr
Artifact 4 - a list of idioms I learned that have common English counter-parts idioms.amr
(Files work in VLC)
I focused on learning through these activities throughout the semester:
Flashcards
Verb Conjugation charts
Grammar charts
Conversations with Pakistani friends
The topics I covered in my learning activities were:
simple future tense conjugations
informal future tense (going to …)
past participle
Vocabulary: school, work, hobbies
Generally, I prefer learning in a structured setting; it helps for the material to be organized in a structure and method that makes sense to me. This is why I focused on flashcards and grammar/verb conjugation charts for the beginning of each new topic I focused on. Having a set of flashcards with words and their definitions, and charts with the material laid out systematically help me visual what I was learning and made it easier for me to recall things I learned. This was particularly important for when I began a new topic because, for example, I often found myself visualizing a mental picture of the verb-conjugation chart if I was having difficulty recalling how to conjugate a verb. Having activities like these very really helpful for building up my “repository” of vocabulary, grammar and conjugations. While learning languages, I find that if I am able to systematize my learning in these ways, I remember things for much longer.
Even so, having conversations with Pakistani friends was a good way to reinforce and retain the things I learned. However, more important than retaining all the information, having conversations with friends helped in two other significant ways. First, through having conversations with friends and hearing how they would form sentences or how they would choose to convey a message helped my learning process a lot; just because a direct translation from English to Urdu often will make sense, it sounds odd to a native speaker. In my conversations with friends I began to notice details about how a native speaker would convey some idea that was not how an English speaker would convey the same idea. Though learning grammar, vocabulary and idioms all help one’s fluency in a language, I have found that knowing how one pieces together words to convey an idea also makes a huge difference in speaking and understanding the language. So, although there is a lot for me to learn regarding this, there were details I picked up throughout the semester that helped with speaking and listening to Urdu that went beyond just making sure I knew what each verb conjugation and each word in isolation meant.
The second part of having conversations with friends that was very beneficial was getting comfortable actually stringing together the fragments of Urdu I was learning through my charts and flashcards. Being able to hear how friends spoke, pronounced words where they put emphasis as well as myself being able to practice pronouncing words and implementing all the vocabulary, grammar and conjugations helped a lot towards improving my comfortableness speaking the language.
Having done SDLC 105 and 110 already, I felt that overall I picked more effective learning strategies and activities than the previous semester. However, during the semester I did notice that the discrepancy in effectiveness for my learning between some types of learning versus others was much larger than I thought; learning through active means (likes going through flash cards and talking) and systematic/methodical organization of grammar/conjugation charts proved extremely helpful compared to listening activities and especially writing activities (like writing our vocabulary words). One of my goals was to improve my listening comprehension, particularly my ability to understand dialogue in Bollywood movies. So, although it is a goal I still wish to achieve, from what I learned during the semester, I think trying to improve my listening comprehension should not be approached primarily through simply watching Bollywood movies or listening to dialogues (though I did not have time during the semester to actually watch many Bollywood movies). I found that I was able to comprehend much more of what others said through saying things myself than by hearing others speaking; since I learn the language better by doing things myself, I found that the more I used new vocabulary, grammar, etc., understanding what others said came much more easily. For example, when I was learning new verb tenses, just having memorized the conjugations did not help my ability to understand the tenses being used when others spoke, however, as soon as I started to become comfortable speaking in those tenses myself, I found that I was suddenly able to understand others much better than when I had just memorized verb conjugations but was not comfortable using them myself. (Though listening does not seem to be one of my stronger ways of learning, hearing others speak was still essential to improving my speaking because I was able to learn pronunciations and sentence structures from hearing them).
The learning activity I created was a “Concentration game”; I had vocabulary words in English and Urdu written on cards. You flip two cards over at a time, trying to match the English or Urdu word with the appropriate translation in the other language. The vocabulary I focused on were about hobbies and activities I used to have (or still have now): mountain biking (mountains, bike, race), soccer/football (“favorite team”, “win”, “lose”, etc.), singing, videogames, art.
